New American Painters

Nicholas Chistiakov is a young Belarusian American conceptual artist and painter working with diverse media. He began producing art in 1990-ies and actively working in the present. His art is a sharp reflection of modernity, an artistic response to our time. In his work he uses variety of subjects, ranging from mythic figures to contemporary urban landscapes. He explores painting in a multiple ways, utilizing styles ranging from photorealist painting to almost abstract expressionist. He always utilizing subjects of his works to serve an abstract artistic goals. For him any subject is an interplay of form, shadow and light. He is restricting himself from naturalist vision of reality in favor of abstract artistic goals. His painting are often depiction of biomorphic semi-abstracted figures isolated in the abstract space. His art is a specific reflection of important events of our time. He seeks for an iconic imagery that represent modernity. Terror of 9-11 left a specific trace on his art. Human tragedy and suffering are the main themes for many of his canvases. Such works as "The Midday Suicide" is an iconic interpretation of tortured life, possibly very close to lives of those female suicide bombers whose actions are widely known and have a great impact on the way we perceive life and death in modernity. Everything might be over in the matter of seconds. People don't have a control of a fragile life anymore. Phenomenon of momentary death is the extremely important for the artist. Sometime he uses known people in his art, he has created a series of portraits of screaming and exploding George W. Bush, a metaphor for what was happening in day of September 2001. Artists seeks his own language, he thinks that contemporary art should seek other methods and forms than art of the past. Old masters indeed great, their art is eternal, but modernity requires different vision, methods and approaches. His art extremely influenced by photography. Modern media greatly affected painting. Many assumed that photography was meant death to painting - in reality this is not, photography helped the painting to find new expressive forms. While taking his subjects directly from photographs, artist prevents himself from copying it exactly - his art often an abstracted blurred interpretation of photography. Every image is an abstraction first at all, there is faces, buildings, trees, clouds, but all of this could be seen firstly as combination of basic geometric forms. This forms he uses to build his compositions. Epic landscapes and seascapes are characteristic for his oeuvre as well - he see the nature as an eternal media which is the connection of past, present and future. Painter actively using color in his work. His photo-based paintings are often monochromatic, while figurative paintings 1 are often use bright palette and almost primary colors. His art is not likely associated with the popular culture, this is rather depiction of subjects of everyday life, common and familiar to everyone. He seeks for a greatness of unimportant, rather unnoticed. He puts reality at the different angle. He finds the moments in the daily routine which is important and might be eternal. He is often able to capture time itself - in the fleeting of painterly layers we see the years of life, from beginning to the end, from the cradle to the grave.

http://www.nicholaschistiakov.com
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